Many companies now place mobile at the heart of their strategy. Some even adopt “mobile first”, where previously they focused their development on classic web uses. This change must be accompanied by an evolution of internal practices, towards the establishment of a software production factory dedicated to mobile applications. It is in fact applying to mobile what has been done on the web side for several years with the DevOps movement.
A few years ago, mobile apps were still relatively simple, with one or two features at most. It was a matter of consulting your bank account or tracking the shipment of a package, without really any critical functions. Since then, the applications have become increasingly rich: an online banking app today offers all the services expected of a bank agency. Elon Musk intends to follow exactly the same path with an application X, which will ultimately offer voice over IP, video and online payment. Mobile is no longer an additional channel added to the web channel, it is now a channel in its own right.
This concept of “super app”, coming from Asia, is just as common in the B to B world, and even in business applications. Thus, several major retail players have embarked on the development of such mobile applications to manage all the logistics of their points of sale, from inventory to the supply chain including replenishment. Tablets and mobiles on iOS and Android are establishing themselves in the field. Indeed, old proprietary terminals suffer from poor ergonomics and require specific training. Today, new generations, savvy mobile users, consider the digital maturity of an organization to be an essential criterion for working there.
Applications and teams that are constantly growing stronger
Historically, the use of mobile was considered marginal, complementary to the web and, therefore, unprofitable and based on technologies little mastered by IT departments. Companies didn’t really have a mobile strategy. They offered few applications and the few available on the app stores operated in silos. Mobile development was the poor relation of the IT department; it suffered from a lack of budget and difficulty recruiting very specific skills.
With the growth in uses, a mobile first strategy has become essential when launching a new product. Faced with this fundamental change, development teams are strengthening themselves to meet increasingly high business expectations regarding these applications.
This last observation implies raising the level of quality of developments and automating their processes. Automation involves in particular the creation of a CI/CD platform. However, this seems natural today in the world of the web. But this is not yet systematically the case in the mobile world.
Mobile development has some particularities, notably the use of Google or Apple stores. It involves providing an application that meets their requirements. This results in an incompressible validation delay. It is therefore impossible to provide fixes quickly. We must therefore be even more rigorous in development. This is one of the major differences between mobile and the web.
An inevitable industrialization of development processes
Mobile development today faces an organizational challenge. On the one hand, the applications are extremely diverse with apps designed for B to C, others for B to B, but also internal teams. The portfolio of applications that a company must be able to manage has literally exploded in recent years. There is a strong transversality of deployment practices in organizations and we must know how to bring together all the agile teams who now work in parallel in the development phase. One of our clients thus aligns five internal development teams to which must be added two external teams.
All these new constraints imply taking a step forward in the industrialization of the mobile application development process. Taking part in this approach means adopting a MobileOps approach.
Managed services, a pragmatic response to this industrialization problem
An important part of this industrialization concerns test automation. Not only do developers have less room for error, but applications must be tested on different types of terminals. Large companies set up mobile farms dedicated to testing, a costly process because the rate of depreciation of phones is very rapid. There are alternatives on the cloud, with providers who offer this type of testing infrastructure open to all, billed by the minute.
To choose the right CI/CD platform, you must keep the specifics of mobile in mind. This is why choosing a managed platform is often best. In fact, this simplifies maintenance and increasing the skills of teams. We will think about monitoring OS versions, libraries, or even managing machine obsolescence. In fact, managed is a quick and effective way to initiate an industrialization process.
Some companies still prefer to deploy this mobile CI/CD platform on their own infrastructures. They do this, among other things, for reasons of strategy and/or confidentiality. However, deploying such a software infrastructure is a long and expensive project.
The key to success: an industrialized product thanks to MobileOps, ideally part of a mobile first strategy
Adopting mobile first means guaranteeing your users that your mobile application is not just an additional channel to the web, but a full-fledged product for acquisition and profitability. Enrolling in MobileOps means industrializing your developments, integrations and deployments.
Industrializing means increasing the quality and sustainability of deliverables. Industrializing means creating trust and strengthening team cohesion. Finally, industrializing means reducing time to market and your production costs.